Borne Tour Debrief

Jeff VanderMeer

There were many amazing moments on my recent five-week Borne book tour—yet the opportunity to visit independent bookstores remains foregrounded in my mind. The experience was sublime on multiple levels.

Each adventure begins with that marvelous instant of arrival, when you step inside the threshold and know you’re about to encounter excellent curation—or you’re just bombarded with amazing books, as if the owners are so eclectic they want you to see everything all at once. Sometimes you get caught up in that initial view, and it takes a long time to venture into the bookstore proper. Other times you plunge right into the stacks and immerse yourself there, first perusing the face-outs and then going through what’s been spined.

Jeff VanderMeer at Midtown Reader (Photo by Saige Roberts)

Either way, it’s an ecstatic experience, and, quite honestly, an experience that was unique at every stop on the tour. Each bookstore listed below has its own personality, its own internal logic, and every entrance felt like stepping into someone’s rich, intimate memory palace. Even stores we happened upon by chance never failed to impress—like the mesmerizing Quimby’s in Chicago, the amazing Simply Books in the Minneapolis airport, the fantastic Booklink in the Boston airport (with a dedicated staff that’s worked in bookstores for decades!), and, one of our new favorites, the quaint Little Otsu in Portland.

Jeff and Ann VanderMeer at Brookline Booksmith

The bookstores share one commonality: bountiful imagination and a sense of both the sheer delight and the importance of the written word. We had wonderful conversations with the staff and managers in these places, conversations that reignited my own passion for books and for book culture.

If you’re wise, you let such places guide you and don’t try to guide them. If there’s a potent and powerful display of poetry in one bookstore, that’s what you buy. If you’re confronted by the best wall of nonfiction you’ve ever seen, that’s what you buy. Ann and I like to support local businesses, so we let the bookstores guide our literary purchases—over 80 books on the list below, ranging from bestsellers to cult favorites, household names to authors of tiny zines. We’ve accumulated enough books to enrich our reading lives for the next year, and we’ve encountered authors that we would not have heard of if these bookstores hadn’t championed them.

Jeff VanderMeer at Booklink Bookstore

I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity to visit so many great bookstores in such a brief period. I hope this list of both bookstores and books will energize you the same way it has energized me. Indies are alive and well—support them.

Jeff VanderMeer is an award-winning novelist and editor, and the author most recently of the New York Times bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy. His fiction has been translated into twenty languages and has appeared in the Library of America’s American Fantastic Tales and multiple year’s-best anthologies. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife.